Liquid fats made more solid have created quite the stir this year, and the commotion is far from over for many restaurants.

The Food and Drug Administration delivered the first blow to trans fats – which are found in partially hydrogenated (solidified) liquid fats and considered by most as harmful – in January when it required them to be listed plainly on nutrition labels, causing a clamor across the food industry to remove them from products.

Partially hydrogenated fats are cheap, flavor-increasing additives with a longer shelf life than other fats and are associated with heightened “bad” (LDL) cholesterol and widely believed to correlate with lowered “good” (HDL) cholesterol.

Now, officials in New York City and Chicago are talking about banning them from restaurants, raising questions about restaurant owners’ rights and the effectiveness of sweeping public health moves.

“Guidance is one thing,” said Pamela White, professor of food science and human nutrition. “A regulation or a rule is another.”

White acknowledged that evidence weighs toward trans fats being harmful, but said the best way to get people to eat heathier is to get them as much information as possible.

The trans fat issue is a little trickier for restaurants, White said, than it is for products found in grocery stores.

Forcing restaurants to display trans fat content on their menus, she said, could greatly restrict the chef’s – and consumer’s – options.

In addition, restaurants would be forced to pay for nutritional evaluation.

“On the other hand, having information so [consumers] know what they’re eating is desirable,” White said.

Sally Barclay, clinician for the Nutrition Clinic for Employee Wellness, said she is generally in favor removing trans fats from restaurants.

“From a public health standpoint, I think it’s a huge step,” said Barclay of the proposed New York City ban.

Barclay said she could see why people might object to a ban on account of rights issues, but that at the very least, restaurants should make the trans fat content of their food available to customers.

“These are very dangerous fats,” Barclay said, pointing out the stance of the American Heart Association, which currently recommends that a scant 1 percent of daily caloric intake come from trans fats.

One idea that emerged out of the trans fat ban discussion in New York is that restaurants could use such fats as butter if they must do so to eliminate trans fats.

Butter and other animal-derived fats contain saturated fats that are also associated with raised LDL cholesterol levels, but not with lowered HDL levels.

Barclay said that saturated fats are much more prevalent and would be difficult to get out of everybody’s diet, unlike trans fats, for which substitutions have already been found in many packaged foods.

“There’s a lot of healthier fats out there,” Barclay said, such as plant-based polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which make the elimination of trans fats from the American diet a possibility.

“It can be done,” she said.

Taste doesn’t necessarily need to be sacrificed in all of this, Barclay said. She mentioned as an example some Doritos she recently purchased, which were made with plant-derived fats. Neither she or her son, she said, found them any less palatable than the old ones.

It may never be possible to prevent people from eating fatty foods, Barclay said, and it might not even be right to enforce something like that, but any effort made to upgrade such tasty edibles is worthwhile.

“It’s not saying that people can’t eat those foods,” she said. “Doing such things as eliminating trans fats is more like offering ‘new and improved’ versions of them.”